Image courtesy of Medsile, Iwaria
As we turn our focus to 2026, OER Africa reflects on a year marked by growth and deepening partnerships across the continent. Our work has continued to champion open educational practices and strengthen the capacity of African institutions to engage meaningfully in the global open education movement.
This Year in Review highlights milestones, collaborations, achievements, and insights that shaped our efforts in 2025, and showcases our collective progress made in realising our vision of vibrant and sustainable African education systems that empower academics and leaders to implement OER effectively.
OE Global Board Award for Organizational Leadership
In 2025, OER Africa (a Saide initiative implemented in partnership with Neil Butcher & Associates) received the Open Education Global Board Award for Organizational Leadership, recognizing its outstanding contributions to advancing open education across the continent. Since its launch in 2008, OER Africa has played a pivotal role in supporting African higher education institutions to integrate OER through awareness-raising, capacity building, policy development, and collaborative networks. Its influence extends globally, including contributions to the 2019 UNESCO OER Recommendation, ongoing monitoring of its implementation, and support in preparing the 2024 implementation guidelines. OER Africa is honoured to be featured among the 2025 OEGlobal Board Award winners.
Continuous Professional Development Frameworks
We continued deploying two of our Continuous Professional Development (CPD) Frameworks, one for academics and another for academic and research librarians. The purpose of the frameworks is to capacitate higher education professionals to work innovatively in the modern world by making use of affordances such as OER, open pedagogies and digital technologies. A third CPD framework for Senior Manager’s is forthcoming and will be released in 2026.
Eleventh Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning (PCF11 2025)
The Commonwealth of Learning convenes the PCF11 every three years, co-hosting the forum with different partners across regions of the Commonwealth. In 2025, OER Africa and Botswana Open University helped to organize the PCF11. OER Africa’s Tony Lelliott presented on the CPD Frameworks. Each framework is supported by a curated set of openly licensed resources together with guidelines for their use. Find the presentation here.
OER Africa’s CPD Network
During 2025, OER Africa’s CPD Network matured into a fully functioning community of practice, bringing together academic development leaders from the University of Namibia (UNAM), Copperbelt University (Zambia), UNISCED (Mozambique), Botswana Open University (BOU), and Henrietta Stockdale Nursing College (South Africa). Building on preparatory consultations and a needs survey conducted in late 2024, the Network successfully delivered a structured series of virtual engagements that combined strategic discussion, institutional case studies, and collaborative design work. Sessions explored the CPD frameworks, institutional planning approaches, diverse CPD modalities, and shared experiences from member institutions, enabling participants to critically reflect on context-specific challenges and transferable practices. A key milestone was the co-design of a reusable workshop package – complete with activities, materials, and a facilitator guide – focussed on creating, licensing, and distributing locally relevant OER for academic staff. This achievement exemplified the Network’s collaborative ethos and demonstrated how open, peer-driven approaches can strengthen institutional CPD capacity while advancing open education practices across the region.
For 2026, we aim to finalize and distribute the collaborative workshop package and enlarge the membership of the CPD network to embrace additional African higher education institutions.
University of Namibia – Blended Learning Guide
In 2025, we partnered with UNAM for a strategic initiative to review and strengthen the University’s OER Policy and its Blended Learning (BL) Guidelines for academic staff. While initial feedback focussed on policy-level enhancements, the review of the BL Guide revealed that UNAM would benefit more from a capacity-building approach than from a purely editorial revision. As a result, OER Africa designed and facilitated a six-session online workshop series involving staff from the Centre for Teaching and Learning and a dedicated BL Committee comprising academic heads and departmental representatives. The workshops engaged participants in critically reviewing sections of the BL Guide, simplifying complex terminology, integrating practical examples, and illustrating how blended learning could be implemented meaningfully across disciplines and departments.
This participatory process not only deepened local understanding of the philosophical and practical dimensions of BL at UNAM, but also ensured institutional ownership of the outcomes. The workshops culminated in the establishment of an editorial team that synthesized the collective contributions into a revised, more accessible, and practice-oriented BL Guide, aligned with UNAM’s teaching and learning context and open education aspirations.
UNESCO Digital Learning Week
OER Africa participated in UNESCO’s Digital Learning Week from 2–5 September 2025. The theme, ‘AI and the Future of Education: Disruptions, Dilemmas, and Directions,’ centred on exploring equitable, ethical, and human-driven approaches to integrating AI into education. Monge Tlaka, Senior Project Manager at OER Africa, contributed to this session Open Educational Resources as digital public goods: Implementing the Dubai Declaration through AI and emerging technologies, bringing African perspectives to this global conversation. Find out more here.
Toolkit for Human Resources
Last year also saw the publication of the Toolkit for Developing Human Resources Policies and Supportive Institutional Environments in Higher Education, which provides a comprehensive, practical guide for higher education institutions to assess, improve, or establish effective HR policies and practices. It is positioned as an OER and contributes to OER Africa’s broader mission to support sustainable education systems in Africa by empowering institutions to improve staff capacity, enhance organisational effectiveness, and create environments conducive to the adoption and integration of OER.
As we move into 2026, OER Africa remains committed to deepening partnerships and supporting institutions to harness openness in building resilient, future-ready education systems. Access the toolkit here.